The reasoning for my guesses:
C and D are said to only have interest in the Palm patents.
This makes sense for Google, which may have no patents at all in this area, and HTC, which may have not as much as the competition (and with the background of the Apple lawsuit).
A and B are said to be interested in both, technology and patents. Lenovo only recently started to get into this business with android phones. It could make sense for them to switch to WebOS. Samsung does Windows Mobile, Android and recently Bada, a linux based operating system. I think, it makes sense for them to build on the existing huge knowledge in this sector and the already existing apps/customers/developers, as Bada just recently launched and didn't get traction yet.
Huawei would make sense too, but they are not as deep into the mobile phone business as the rest, i think.
- RIM has its own boatload of patents, so it didn't need those.
- While its OS is mediocre from an end-user standpoint, it does have A LOT of very valuable features. Top-notch security, great push & provisioning tech, good compression etc certainly don't sound sexy, but they're the reason governments and corporations can run on a BB, something that's not true of any other modern smartphone (nor is anyone else seemingly interested in this market).
-RIM does do a fair amount of aquisitions, but they're all fairly small - 10-100 person companies. Such a large aquisition seems quite at odds with their usual approach.
-BB OS 6 might be fairly competitive (due out later this year)
It is incorrect to dismiss the possibility on that ground: RIM has the worst smartphone OS from either a usability standpoint or from an application development standpoint.
They've got major catching up to do; internal development doesn't seem fast enough. We're nearly midway through 2010 and the closest to a decent browser that they've delivered is a few leaked images.
To speculate that they would be interested just because you don't like their OS and think their development team is too slow is also incorrect.
I will agree that their OS is lacking in many areas compared to many of the newcomers in this space, but that doesn't mean they run out and buy another failed phone OS for a whole lot of money in exchange a few features their rapidly growing team could implement or a smaller acquisition like their purchase of Torch Mobile could deliver. RIM's main focus is also more enterprise customers than consumer and the feature set demands of their customers are a little different.
I think saying WebOS failed is completely off-base. From everything I've read, WebOS was a very successful operating system. Rather, the company around the OS failed.
From a historical perspective (not sure if it is currently true), Palm's customer base would have lined up well with RIM's, too.
First off, the "another failed phone OS" comment is ridiculous. webOS is largely what HP was interested in. It's been developed in a few years by a fairly small team and has obviously added a significant amount of value to the company and the resulting sale price. It seems like a great OS to use; I don't own a palm device. Both critically and financially it has been a success.
This whole discussion is speculation... Once can objectively state that RIM is pretty far behind in delivering a modern mobile OS, even those targeting enterprise customers. I didn't even mention the fact that application development for the platform is somewhat of a nightmare, something that will be increasingly important to a CIO.
Regardless, arguably, the consumer market is in fact a lot more important to the company both today and going forward than you've made note of. Look at the company's marketing material: it is generally centered around media playback or BBM.
Buying Palm, porting BBM to WebOS, and slapping the Blackberry logo onto the Pre and Pixi would be a pretty easy way to improve their position in the consumer market.
Well, there is no way RIM is going to ditch their own OS, it is incredibly popular and well known amoung business users. They are already starting to add new features catered towards the general public, like Webkit browser, for instance.
The only reason they could buy RIM is if they wanted to do their own line of consumer phones, and from what we have seen, Palm has not really taken off yet. So it would be better for RIM to focus on improving their own OS, dumb it down a bit for new users.
